Measuring the Social Impact

Accessing the impact of our venture is essential. However, when very little or almost no data is available on the statistics of the community we are targeting, this activity could be exhausting. Therefore, for this venture initially we decided to measure the social impact qualitatively as opposed to quantitatively. India and Pakistan, both have a very high population and therefore if we decided to measure the impact in term of the number of people we touched, we could  have obtained considerably large numbers. However, we wish to measure how deeply we have affected the villages.  Therefore, we have listed out measurement characteristics which would help us quantitatively measure our impact after the first pilot program.

Given below, I have tried to assess the impact of 'Rural Works' on the selected village after a single program. Assuming 9 students decide to venture into a village for a 2 month period to make a social impact into the village,dividing these students into groups of 3, there could be 3 broad areas these students could concentrate on.

Let us assume the students choose the following domains and enlist a goal they hope to achieve at the end of the program. Also, output parameters that could be used to measure the impact of the venture in each of these domains have been highlighted:

1. Education: Imparting basic computer skills to students in high school.
• Goal: Students should be able to use a computer easily for all basic functionality.
• Output Measurement:
• A simple test which assesses the participants ability to use the computer(Browsing, Word, E-Mails).
• Points could be awarded on the complexity of the task performed on the computer

2. Awareness on women's health: A campaign to bring about awareness towards maternity health care benefits.
• Goal: Women aware of maternity healthcare and the benefits they could avail from the government.
• Output Measurement:
• Maternal mortality rate
• Adolescent fertility rate
• Number of child births in hospitals as opposed to homes

3. Best practices in agriculture: An interactive study that teaches the farmers means of achieving higher productivity in agriculture.
• Goal: Farmers utilize the best practices in agriculture to increase their profits.
• Output Measurement:
• Profit on the yield
• Quality of the produce(% of the produce spoilt)
• Satisfaction by farmers

Having listed down these characteristics, the outcome of this social venture could be short term or long term. We essentially wish to determine the change that the campaign has brought about in the village. Therefore, the output measurement parameters could be used to make an initial assessment of the village. After the completion of the program, the same parameters are used to evaluate the benefit the community received from this venture.

The long term outcomes of this program could be an influx of wealth in the rural community, reduction of government expenditure in healthcare and increase in employment.

Finally an individual assessment of each of the activities would have to be carried out to evaluate if the individual goal of each activity aligns with the Goal of the organization.

The Goals of the organization can be summarized in a broad level as :

"Empowerment of the rural community by facilitating cultural exchange"